Watchers, carers, and administrators: the smart homes of tomorrow

How smart should a smart home be before it's worthy of the name? To date, perhaps the term has been too readily applied to homes that are merely high-tech. Automated systems, remote control of appliances from mobile devices, TV and phone over IP--these are all welcome breakthroughs. These technologies are almost synonymous with the smart home and so-called intelligent buildings in general, but there's little or no intelligence to them. For a home to be considered smart, it must in a sense become a robot--a machine capable of, if not true intelligence (and certainly not sentience), sensing data, processing it, drawing conclusions of its own accord, and then acting upon those conclusions.